Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the fourth in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes four through six of Joyce’s Ulysses. I begin by characterizing the lower-middle-class cultural milieu of the Bloom sections of the novel with its focus on popular and middlebrow as well as high culture, as opposed to the highbrow sections devoted to Stephen Dedalus. I more closely consider the novel’s possibly almost occult use of Homeric correspondences with help from Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. Then I investigate “Calypso,” particularly the introduction of Leopold Bloom as curious, kind, artistic, science-minded, socially outcast, and lower-middle-class Odysseus; the ambivalent-to-hostile evocation of Zionism; the subversive if potentially disturbing act of sexualizing domestic women, domestic children, and domestic spaces; and the theme of metempsychosis. In “The Lotus Eaters,” I focus on Bloom’s skeptical view of religion as opiate of the masses, as well as his pornographic correspondence as Henry Flower and his fancied erotic bath. Finally, I consider “Hades,” with its theme of fathers and sons, its pioneering use of the trauma plot, its secular conception of death, and the possibility that Ulysses overall is not just a revision of The Odyssey but also of Dante’s Inferno and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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